Migrants push east to avoid fortified border, with tragic results

By Leslie BeresteinUNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 29, 2004

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune

Border Patrol agents carried the body of Maria Eugenia Martinez, whose body was found at least three days after she died in Davies Valley, a remote part of the Imperial Valley desert. Martinez died in terrain so rough that no off-road vehicle could access it.

Maria Eugenia Martinez had walked enough. For more than four hours, she and about a half-dozen others had trudged behind a smuggler through the rocky brown foothills and labyrinthine canyons on the western flank of the Imperial Valley desert.

The mid-July temperature was well over 100 degrees, the air thick with unusual humidity. The group was tired. People were running out of water. Some of them, including Martinez, 39, were starting to feel sick from the heat.

Her goal was to make it back to Los Angeles, from where she had been deported several days earlier. She wanted so badly to return that she had lied to immigration officials, telling them she was Mexican so she wouldn't be sent back to her native Guatemala.

In Los Angeles she had a job in a clothing factory, relatives, friends. In Guatemala, there were bills to pay. There were school expenses for her children and a lien on her mother's house, a debt from her first trip across the border. Her first grandchild was on the way.

She needed to get back to work.

But as the day wore on, returning lost its urgency. Three miles south of rural state Route 98, the road the migrants were likely headed toward, Martinez crumbled to a stop in a remote corner of the desert called Davies Valley.

Operation GatekeeperOne in an occasional series

Overview Almost 3,000 people have died in the last decade while trying to illegally enter the United States.

Illegal immigration routes shifted to the deserts and the mountains when urban crossings were shut down. The shift surprised U.S. officials, who thought the difficult terrain would be a deterrent.

Background Operation Gatekeeper went into effect Oct. 1, 1994, to block hundreds of people from surging across the border every night in urban San Diego County. The local effects included rows of fencing, video camera surveillance and more Border Patrol agents.

"Let them catch me," she gasped to a female companion, as the smuggler urged the others on. "I'm going to stay here and let them catch me."

The Border Patrol eventually found her.

By then, she had been dead at least three days. Her decomposing body was found in a dry wash, her head resting on a stranger's backpack, her limbs stretched across the pebbly sand as if she had fallen into bed exhausted.

When her body was found, Martinez joined the list of nearly 3,000 people known to have died while crossing illegally into the United States from Mexico since January 1995, three months after Operation Gatekeeper was implemented along San Diego County's urban border areas and pushed migrant traffic east.

Architects of Gatekeeper anticipated that human traffic would shift but relied on the inhospitable terrain of the mountains and desert to deter most would-be border crossers. It didn't. Today the U.S. government spends millions to rescue people who risk their lives attempting to slip through the fortified border.

Gatekeeper began Oct. 1, 1994. It combined fencing, high-tech surveillance equipment and the addition of more than 1,000 Border Patrol agents to control what was then the nation's busiest illegal border crossing.

Although there are more undocumented immigrants in the country today than there were a decade ago, supporters of Gatekeeper and related efforts in Texas and Arizona say that border enforcement has helped stem what otherwise would have been a greater flow.

But Gatekeeper has also been labeled a human-rights fiasco. Undocumented immigrants continue to cross the southwestern border, lured by an unending supply of jobs and the urge to flee dire economic prospects at home. Except that now, smugglers charge them at least $1,000, often much more, to be led across some of the deadliest terrain in the United States.

They march for hours, sometimes days, across the desolate expanses of sand, rocks and mountains that line the border from southeastern California to New Mexico, where they face heat exhaustion and dehydration in summer and hypothermia in winter. In Texas, they try to cross isolated stretches of the Rio Grande.

The vast majority make it. The rest turn up dead or don't turn up at all. Some aren't found for years, until someone comes across bones in the desert. Close to one-third of the dead are unidentified, buried in paupers' graves in lonely border-town cemeteries.

Maria Eugenia Martinez was working in Los Angeles when she was deported.

"It is just vast expanses of hell they are crossing," said Claudia Smith, border project director of the Sacramento-based California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. "Giving the appearance of a border under control, especially in the San Diego sector, has come at an enormous price."

Deadly trend

There were deaths along the border before Operation Gatekeeper. Between 1985 and mid-1992, about 175 pedestrians were killed on San Diego County freeways, many of them migrants who were struck by vehicles as they tried to run across lanes. Farther east, the Rio Grande has long claimed migrants as victims.

"I like to remind people that deaths were occurring prior to the change in strategy," said U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, who as the former Border Patrol sector chief in El Paso developed Operation Hold the Line, the 1993 prototype for Gatekeeper.

The Border Patrol did not record deaths before 1998. Statistics kept by Mexican consulates since 1995 – and by coroners in U.S. border counties – show there were relatively few deaths a decade ago compared with today.

Sixty-one migrants died crossing the southwestern border illegally in 1995, according to Mexican government figures. As of Monday, 286 have died since Jan. 1.

Because San Diego was once the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, "you needed to tighten things up dramatically in the San Diego area before it got traffic really moving into the desert and mountains," said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California San Diego. "There were always drowning deaths in the Rio Grande but it was really Gatekeeper that drove up the death toll."

Coroner records in Imperial County bear witness to this traffic shift. Ten migrants died trying to cross the border there in 1995, not including car accident victims.

Twenty-two died in 1996. Forty-eight died in 1997.

Then in 1998, 114 migrants died.

"I remember 1998," said Henry Proo, a coroner investigator for Imperial County. "That set and broke all the records."

Until 2001, the Border Patrol's El Centro sector had the greatest number of migrant deaths in the nation. This distinction went to the Tucson sector in 2002, after additional enforcement in El Centro led smugglers to keep moving east.

More than half of the migrants who have died along the southwestern border since October were in southern Arizona, according to Border Patrol figures.

The statistics are often disputed. Border Patrol reports have at times excluded some skeletal remains, and only fatalities that occur within 43 Southwest border counties are tracked.

Mexican government statistics are generally regarded by migration experts as the most comprehensive. The estimated 2,900 deaths since 1995 include Mexican nationals, who comprise most of the dead, and unidentified bodies. But they exclude dozens of migrants from other countries, such as Maria Eugenia Martinez.

Peggy Peattie / Union-Tribune photos

Cemetery employees in Imperial County lowered a pine casket containing the body of an unidentified migrant into a grave earlier this month.

A decision to leave

Martinez came from a green, hilly coffee-farming region called Huehuetenango in northern Guatemala. She was a married mother of eight who lived in El Terrero, a small town in the lowlands, where she sold homemade chorizo from a stall in the market square.

She was a hardworking, business-minded woman, relatives say, with a penchant for humming romantic ballads while she worked. Her goal was to earn enough money in the United States so that she could return in a few years and open a butcher shop, with shiny tile counters.

She also wanted to send her younger children to high school, which families must pay for in Guatemala. The tuition was more than she and her husband, a bricklayer, would be able to afford.

But there were also personal reasons behind her decision to leave, hurriedly and without telling her husband, on April 10, 2003.

"She left because of my father," said Geovany Huinak Martinez, 18, her second-oldest son, who with other relatives described his parents' marriage as a broken and abusive one. "That was most of it."

Martinez wanted to be financially independent from her husband, her son said. So she borrowed money, using her mother's house as collateral, and slipped away quietly with a smuggler, bound for Los Angeles.

She called Geovany on his cell phone on her way out of town.

"I wished her luck," he said, his voice wavering, "and told her to write."

Work and money

That time, she made it.

Once in Los Angeles she sought out a half-brother and several cousins, who helped her get started. She settled in a Central American neighborhood downtown, sharing a small apartment tucked amid discount stores and money-wiring services with three roommates. She made new friends who gave her an American nickname, Jenny.

Martinez struggled to stay employed, taking the bus to Las Vegas for weeks at a time to clean office buildings between jobs in Los Angeles garment factories. She last worked at a factory downtown trimming threads off finished clothing, a task she dubbed "trimiando," for which she earned less than $80 a week.

But she saved enough money to send home. When Geovany was married last year in El Terrero, she paid for the wedding. When she learned he had a child on the way, she began shopping for baby clothes.

"They have such beautiful things here," she told Geovany on the phone. "I want to see my grandchild running around in the park in Huehuetenango, wearing the gifts I'm going to send."

On June 25, shortly before her grandchild was due, Martinez turned 39. She celebrated frugally, sharing a toast of coffee with her roommates at home. There was no money for cake.

Less than a week later, she left for work and never returned. Somewhere between the factory and home, she was picked up by immigration authorities.

She was dropped off at the Tijuana border gate after dark with a few other deportees. One, a young Oceanside waiter, took pity on Martinez and another single woman and invited them to stay at his grandmother's house in town.

"They were really scared," said Armando Rodriguez, 23.

For several days, the women stayed with Rodriguez's grandmother. They called friends and relatives and asked them to send money for a smuggler.

But neither Martinez nor the other woman, a 25-year-old Oceanside mother of two who was apprehended on her way home from work, could afford to be smuggled through the tight security of the San Ysidro border checkpoint.

So they left together for Mexicali.

Peggy Peattie / Union-Tribune photos

The majority of the markers in the paupers' field at Park Terrace Cemetery in Holtville in Imperial County are unmarked. Some migrants' bodies aren't found for years, until someone comes across bones in the desert.

Into the inferno

The crossing into Davies Valley begins west of Mexicali near a place called Las Pistas, or the airfields, named for a onetime clandestine landing strip.

"The people they have found dead, they enter through here," said Jose Luis Hernandez, an agent with Mexico's Grupo Beta, which is charged with protecting and rescuing migrants.

The start of the trail is within sight of the highway to Tijuana, below the treacherous La Rumorosa mountain pass. From the road it's an eight-to 10-hour hike to California Route 98, longer than other nearby crossings. But there is no fence and there are no cameras. There is nothing but a squat concrete post marking the border.

Migrants who cross here clamber over sun-baked rocky outcrops and wind through a maze of dry washes, where their feet sink in coarse sand.

Long before they reach the border, those who brought a gallon of water have drunk at least half, Hernandez said. Some start trying to lighten their load.

Most migrants who enter the desert are woefully unprepared. Few have ever seen a desert, and smugglers routinely downplay the difficulty of the trip.

By the time many cross the border, they are feeling the effects of heat-related illness: flu-like headaches and cramps, fatigue, dizziness, nausea. The more dehydrated one is, the worse the symptoms.

The human body needs 12 to 20 ounces of water every 20 minutes to survive in the desert heat, said Dr. Harvey Meislin, chairman of the emergency medicine department at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center in Tucson. Without it, a person's body temperature rises and heatstroke can occur.

Some migrants Meislin has seen have suffered permanent brain damage, becoming "a young person who has had an old person's stroke," he said. Others wind up with damaged kidneys, livers or nerves. The most damaged survivors return home as invalids. Others, perhaps mercifully, just die.

"They get confused, they get tired, they get dizzy," Meislin said. "They don't move. They can't go anywhere. They lay down on the ground, and they can die that day."

'Come on, keep going'

The heat got to Martinez sooner than it did the others. The group had been hiking at least four hours since morning and the temperature kept rising.

"Ya no puedo," she told the young woman from Oceanside. "I can't go on."

"She started feeling sick, saying she couldn't keep walking," said the woman's mother, who lives in Oceanside and spoke to her daughter by phone after the ordeal. She spoke on condition of confidentiality because of her daughter's undocumented status. Her daughter's children remain in Oceanside.

When Martinez could go no farther, two men stayed with her. One placed his backpack under her head as a pillow.

Her companion from Oceanside followed the group, but the water soon ran out and everyone panicked. The entire group limped back to Mexico on a different trail. They never saw Martinez or the two men again.

Miscalculation

Before Operation Gatekeeper started, it was expected that migrant traffic would move east, said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. But not to the deadly degree that it has.

"It was always the belief that the geography of the Otay Mountains and of the desert were too harsh for the numbers. ... The Border Patrol always felt there would be some crossing there – there always had been – but that by and large, the majority would not try to come across in those areas," said Meissner, who oversaw the implementation of Gatekeeper as head of the INS, which was eliminated after the creation of the Homeland Security Department.

"So it was very much the belief that geography would work in favor of the strategy, that it would be a natural deterrent," she said.

INS officials soon noticed differently.

In 1998, the year Imperial County coroner investigator Henry Proo and his colleagues picked up 114 dead migrants in the desert and out of the All-American Canal, the Border Safety Initiative was launched, channeling resources into search-and-rescue equipment and training for Border Patrol agents. Two million dollars went toward search and rescue this year.

Thousands of migrants have been rescued, some on the brink of death. But more than 300 still die each year, leading critics to question the wisdom of a border strategy that requires rescues in the first place.

"There is a terrible irony to launching this effort to rescue people that you put in mortal danger," said Claudia Smith of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. "People are crossing in more remote places where the possibility of being rescued is minimal."

Lonely death

Maria Eugenia Martinez was found by Border Patrol agents as they flew over Davies Valley in a helicopter, surveying its hidden crannies the morning of July 14. They called Proo. It was his fourth migrant case that week.

To reach her he drove three miles uphill through twisting, rock-strewn washes lined with spiny ocotillo, swerving to avoid boulders and deep sand.

She died in terrain so rough, no off-road vehicle could access it. The coroner, assisted by Border Patrol agents, had to hike into the canyon she lay in and carry her out.

Driving back to the morgue along Route 98 with Martinez's sun-blackened body in the back, Proo glanced back at the foothills he had just driven out of, grim, sharp slabs of rock and jagged earth leading back to Mexico.